The more arms we have

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Last year, after the first major de bate on a defense issue in many years, the Senate approved, by the narrowest of margins, the deploy ment of the Safeguard anti‐ballistic missile (ABM) system. This year's debate was something of an anti climactic replay but with different nuances. The Administration's re quest to begin initial work on a na tionwide “anti‐Chinese” defense was rejected but otherwise its expanded ABM scraped by.

It did so Ironically because the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT)—the most promising effort to curtail the Soviet‐American arms race since World War II—seemed to have gone so well. The Administration ar gued that an affirmative vote for an expanded ABM was necessary so that the United States could have a strong hand in SALT, and swing Sen ators did not want to be open to the charge of sabotaging the talks. It was almost certainly this fact rather than belief in the military need and effec tiveness of Safeguard that led to a victory for ABM proponents. Cer tainly the technical case for Safe guard seemed weaker this year than last, the deficiencies of the system having been exposed by opposition witnesses and, to a substantial de gree, conceded by supporters.

In “Race to Oblivion” Herbert York explains those weaknesses as he did so effectively in Congressional testi mony these last two years, and as he did within the councils of the Eisen hower and Kennedy Administrations when the question of ABM was de bated vigorously but in a smaller. arena. If not as involved in the tech nical details as some of the recent opponents of the ABM, York brought to the debate as great a depth of background and experience as any witness.

York has been, as his subtitle says, a participant in the arms race—an active and influential one. He was the first director of the Livermore atom ic‐weapons laboratory, the first chief scientist of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency and the first Director of Defense Research and Engineering. Now professor of physics, dean of the graduate school, and Acting Chancellor of the Univer sity of California at San Diego, he has concluded that the arms race is doubly absurd.

First, he argues that while the mili tary power of the United States has been steadily increasing since World War II, our national security has been rapidly and inexorably decreasing, and that the same thing has been happening to the Soviet Union. Sec ond, he argues that the power to de cide whether or not doomsday has arrived is in the process of passing from statesmen and politicians to lower‐level officers and technicians and, eventually, to machines.

Most readers will find it easy to agree with York on his first point. Few would dispute the fact that the damage to be expected in the event of a nuclear war is now immensely greater than in the fifties, and, in fact, quite beyond our comprehen sion. It seems clear that the deliv ery of 100 or so modern weapons against either of the superpowers would be enough to destroy it as a going society. Yet, we now have sev eral thousand weapons in our stra tegic arsenal, ‘a number that will in crease several fold in the next years if the arms race goes on. Beyond that there is the prospect of an increasing number of nations joining the nuclear “club.”

There may be dispute about a nu clear war being more likely now than in the fifties and about the diffusion of war‐making responsibility to lower command levels. The author's discus sion of multiple independently target able re‐entry vehicles, in a chapter he appropriately titles “MIRV, The Mul tiple Menace,” provides perhaps the best argument to support his con tention.

With a single missile carrying sev eral warheads it would be possible, given the right combination of war head yield, delivery accuracy and re liability, to destroy more than one— perhaps several—adversary missiles in a preemptive attack unless the ad versary launched its missiles on the basis of radar warning of attack. In that possible response, York sees the seeds of disaster. The time interval between radar warning and impact of adversary missiles would be short— far too short for a deliberate assess ment of whether or not to launch one's own missiles, if so how many, and toward what targets.

The implication is, as York says, a “preprogrammed” President, or worse yet, the delegation of launch ing authority to lower levels of com mand and possibly to a computer. Considering the fallibility of both people and electronic systems, the adoption of such a “launch‐on‐warn ing” doctrine as a response to MIRVs would seem unwise for either super power, but not impossible. Should ei ther adopt such a doctrine, York's second absurdity would surely have been realized.

Some of the author's other obser vations will also doubtless prove to be contentious, but generally he makes a good case in their support. York argues that the present stra tegic balance is in a sense one of con siderable stability, i.e., that it is not likely to be seriously upset by either side suddenly acquiring a new weap on. He suggests that large changes in our defense budget would have only modest effects on our capabilities, claiming that the defense budget is arbitrary by a factor of about two.

He suggests that our programs for the development of new kinds of atomic and hydrogen weapons have, during the last decade, been con cerned largely with embellishments he calls baroque or rococo. And he argues that there have really been no useful major new strategic‐weapons systems conceived since Sputnik— the post‐Sputnik ideas got nowhere and nearly all of the systems on which we have come to depend for deterrence had their origins prior to Sputnik.

York concedes that we made a number of mistakes in weapons‐sys tems decisions during the period of his involvement in these decisions, but he claims that nearly all of the errors were in the nature of over reaction to the threats that did not exist, or in the construction of sys tems that were not needed. He argues that there are no cases of our having failed to go ahead with a major weapons system when we should have. He would excuse the early overreactions, e.g., our going ahead with the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb because of a mistaken belief that the Germans were moving ahead rapidly with a similar program. But he sug gests that we have continued to make the same kinds of mis takes. The difficulty is in what we have now come to call “worst case analysis,” i.e., in assuming that the adversary is likely to develop any weapon system of which we think him capable, that everything he tries will work nearly perfectly, and that our own weapons sys tems may work at the lower limits of their expected per formance.

These ground rules for analy sis, and the long lead times re quired for the development and procurement of modern strate gic weapons, have resulted in systems that we have not need ed. This is a prescription for an arms race. York clearly feels that it is the responsibility of political leaders to recognize that “worst case analysis” as a basis for decision‐making can lead us to take greater risks than if we exercised more re straint in responding to ambig uous or possible adversary de velopments.

In addition to his extensive treatment of issues of current interest — ABM, MIRV and SALT—York discusses most of the other major weapons‐sys tems controversies of the last two decades. Some, for exam ple the B‐70 bomber and the long and expensive effort to de velop a nuclear powered air craft, are discussed more thor oughly and with greater insight than in any other easily acces sible account.

Buried in the book is another story, the story of York's metamorphosis — per haps a better word than either education or conversion —from one of the key members of the military technical Estab lishment to one of its most ar ticulate critics. In this meta morphosis York is in distin guished company. The writings and Congressional testimony of Ceorge Kistiakowsky, Jerome Wiesner and Donald Hornig, science advisers to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and John son, are witness to their having come to very similar views. And in the writings of Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist instrumental in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb, there is a similar story.

There is a fascinating ques tion here: Why have the Yorks, the Sakharovs and dozens of others who served their Gov ernments in the development of weapons of the nuclear age come to view the pursuit of na tional security through the de velopment and procurement of military hardware as an illusion and a misallocation of re sources, while others, the Ed ward Tellers and the John Fos ters, both successors to York as directors of Livermore and the latter his successor in the Pentagon as well, still seem captives of their pasts and pro ponents of ever more esoteric weapons programs?

If York's book is as widely read as it should be, it will make a valuable contribution to the public understanding at a critical time. A large part of the public is now distressingly in different to the questions of de fense and arms control policy. Many see the issues as simply too complex and too technical to be bothered with. The indif ference of others, particularly the young, has its basis in the conviction that the arms race is so absurd as to defy rational discussion.

York deals with both prob lems. He shows clearly, that critical questions relating to weapons‐systems choices can be dealt with without getting bogged down in technical de tails; and while admitting that the arms race is absurd, he ne vertheless makes a persuasive plea for dealing with the ab surdities rather than throwing up one's hands in despair. ■